1 – I am a Working Mother

2 – I am a Woman with Children and a Career

3 – Other

Hmm.  How would you answer that, readers? 

The way I define myself keeps changing, is the problem.  I’m going to be out of the mother business soon enough and never quite made it to feeling like a “Working Mother,”  so I think the first option is out.

The second option,”I am a woman with children and a career” is a little better in that I was a “woman” before I was a mother, but it seems a little out of reach as well.  I might, someday, get to call myself ”a woman with children and a job,” and then a few more years after that, I’d really like to retain the ”a woman with a job” part, too.   But a “Woman with Children and Career?”  “Careers” sound like such permanent and uninterupted things, things people have expressly gone to school to prepare for when they were young, worked away at for a three or so further decades, and then eventually retire from.  Can the majority of mothers even do this?  **Having a Career** sounds so intense and single-minded.  While “intense” certainly fits me, what mother is ever free to be single-minded as well? 

What I am is chronically multi-minded instead.  And every one of my many minds is subject to sudden and unpredictable change as my children and my life and I all go lurching along together. 

Which seems to leave only the last option: “other.”  I’d probably have chosen that option anyway, being the obnoxious iconoclast that I am, but in this case I think it really is the only one that fits.   In the end I think I choose “I am a woman:” or maybe,  ”I (just) am,” period.

How about you?

Creative commons   Child’s Drawing Photo by an0nym0usmus & Giraffe Photo by Timothy K. Hamilton  (see great comment by Timothy, below!)

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